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Received opinions, only partially digested. Entertainingly wrong.

The problem with deriving social and political views from an examination of the available data in the relevant scientific fields is that what you end up with is unlikely to resemble any traditional political position. As far as I am aware, my (still crystallising) views would be balked at by pretty much any group or party you care to name.

Is the average lifespan of a population controlled by the relative importance of two different means of transmitting information? Organisms with a longer lifespan have more opportunity to gather, collate and transmit (memetic) information to new generations. Organisms with a shorter lifespan can more easily adapt to environmental changes through the rapid modification of (genetic) information.

Personal ideology status: inchoate. Or probably just incoherent, inconsistent and likely to remain so. Used to be a centre-left social-democracy kind of person. I’m increasingly of the opinion that none of the socio-political systems in use anywhere really approaches what might be considered optimal for the long-term future of humanity. Gaining a better appreciation of the heritability of human characteristics really alters your worldview.

It’s bizarre how much time, effort and money is spent educating young kids when the evidence suggests it accounts for so little. It’s like giving a farmer all the modern agricultural technology known to man and then expecting him to produce a bumper crop from seeds of the wild form of the plant rather than a modern variety.

The number of mutations in the genomes of one’s children (and thus the likelihood of features like autism and ugliness) increases with paternal age. Surely this is a feature and not a bug? If a man finds a partner willing to bear his children as soon as he passes puberty he is likely to be a decent bet, and so his characteristics pass down to his offspring with the minimum of alterations. The older he becomes the greater the likelihood that he is a bit of duffer, and so more of the cards in his hand get replaced with ones from the pack. The mean quality of his kids drops but the standard deviation rises…